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Nataliya Gerasimova to Finance

Nataliya Gerasimova has joined NHH and the Department of Finance in a tenure-track assistant professor position for seven years.

Her main areas of specialisation are hedge funds, portfolio management, and interactions between institutional investors and politicians.

She explores how political environment influences financial decisions of institutional investors. In his presidential address (2015), the American finance professor Luigi Zingales raises the issue of the financial industry buying out political power. The actions of politicians may have a significant impact on financial markets.

Why do links with politicians may impact mutual fund investments? The US congress passes laws that affect firms competitive environment, product markets, labor force and capital. If legislators have significant mutual fund holdings, they may change their policy positions or share information with funds about the legislative process to increase the returns on these holdings, besides their primary duty to serve public interest.

"House of Funds"

"In my paper “House of Funds”, I document that political connections are an important driver of investment strategies of US mutual funds", Nataliya says.

"I have collected data on mutual fund holdings of US Congress members and equity holdings of mutual funds from 2004 to 2013. I show that funds whose shares belong to politicians place larger bets and trade more actively in stocks of politically sensitive firms. Connected mutual funds perform significantly better on these equity holdings than their non-connected peers”, says Nataliya who originally comes from Russia.

Her research interests also include structural econometrics and models of asymmetric information.

Background

Before joining NHH, Nataliya Gerasimova was a PhD candidate at the Swiss Finance Institute at the University of Lausanne. In spring 2016 she was a visiting scholar at the J. Mack Robinson College of Business of the Georgia State University. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she completed the Master’s programme in Economics at the University of Bonn.